SocialSphere, Inc.

It was wonderfully heartening to read Connie Reece's post on Twitter and the horror in Mumbai from Tuesday. She was a Twitterer who did her research to, as she put it, "sift the wheat from the chaff" when it came to sorting through all the news coming out around the terrorist attacks on one of India's financial hubs.

As Jeremiah Owyang points out in his excellent post on the subject, social tools like Twitter can easily spread information faster than ever imagined. This is great if the information is correct, but what if it's not:

First, there was the Tylenol incident--an example of how to respond to crisis. Now, there is the Motrin incident--an example of how not to respond in a crisis. Interestingly enough (and many people don't know this), both products are marketed by the same company, McNeil Consumer Products, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. So how can the company that did such an exemplary job in handling the Tylenol tragedy (and ensuing scare) act so slowly when it got caught in a social media groundswell over the weekend?

While I'm sure Motrin's business won't die because its web site was offline for the better part of a day, I still have a hard time wondering why they didn't have a backup site ready to go, or at least another video ready to go.

But more importantly, McNeil, like so many companies producing multimedia content for consumption online, failed to look at social media for anything more than a tool for marketing to the consumer. The folks at Motrin could've used all of the social media tools and services at their disposal to test messages with a smaller audience before releasing it to the general public.

I resisted the incredible urge to add my voice to the post-election noise for most of yesterday and today, but my perusal of InformationWeek has forced my hand. Mitch Wagner wrote a very good analysis of the president-elect's pioneering use of Web 2.0 and social-networking technologies. Mitch hailed the election as "the end of the era of television presidency that started with JFK, and the beginning of the Internet presidency."

Mitch then went on to quote SocialSphere advisor Joe Trippi, which is of course when my ears perked up.

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I am surrounded by political junkies at my new job. With the election in full swing and inspired by past successes, John Della Volpe came up with a great idea–the social media war room.

Every day at 9:30am, we all come together at the table to review the day’s news, priorities and challenges. We share the clips, comments and objectives for each of our clients. We’re still working out the kinks, including automating the clips and speeding up the process (we’ve only been at it one day so far), but I think we’re on to something. In this Web 2.0 world, it’s easy to lose touch with the people immediately around you. Plus, when you’re ADHD like me, forcing yourself to come to the table every day with concrete plans for the day will keep you focused!

I’ll let you know how things go, but I think this idea–reinforcing interpersonal and group interaction–is critical to the success of any organization. Excuse me while I slip back into email hell…

Also posted on: http://morethanmarketing.net/